


the one where Bucky is a cat

by pure1magination



Series: Stony drabbles [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky is a cat, Fluff and Feels, M/M, Protective Bucky Barnes, Reincarnation?, Steve Rogers Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 03:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7668439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pure1magination/pseuds/pure1magination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony really wants a cat. but it's Steve who gets one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the one where Bucky is a cat

**Author's Note:**

> the first in a series of Stony one-shots
> 
> most these probably aren't connected, but they could if you want them to be

Tony had always wanted a cat. -Okay, he’d wanted everything from gerbils to dolphins to a giraffe; according to J.A.R.V.I.S., he inherited his penchant for wanting exotic animals from his father, who once had a flock of flamingos in his backyard. But even though he’d want this animal for a day, or that animal for a day, he always kept coming back to cats.

Cats were pretty great, in Tony’s opinion. Their athletic capabilities were a marvel of physics, their purring could help heal bones and tissue damage, and was a great stress reducer, not to mention they’re fuzzy and affectionate and so darn cute. Tony had argued with Pepper  _ multiple  _ times about why they should have a cat, but it kept coming back to the same thing: Pepper said no. Tony would pout, Pepper would worry aloud that it was a phase, that Tony would forget to take care of it (“That’s what I have  _ you  _ for!”), or that Tony would perform some sort of horrific experiments on it and put the poor thing through nightmarish torture.

In the end, she always won.

So Tony had taken up a habit of visiting the humane society. There were lots of cats there, friendly and eager for attention. The woman at the front desk barely reacted when he came in anymore, except to glance up and give him a smile. She used to give him the whole pitch about taking home one of their pets, but he had to keep rolling his eyes and explaining he wasn’t allowed, and eventually, she’d realized he was serious.

Tony paced along the cages, saying hello to his favorites. Or, he was about to say hello, anyway, when around the corner, he heard a familiar voice.

“Yeah? You want the string?”

Weird. What was  _ he  _ doing here? Tony rounded the corner, and there was Captain Rogers, with a piece of yarn dangling from his stupidly perfect hand, fawning over what was quite possibly the ugliest kitten in New York.

“Well, well, well,” Tony said, “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Tony.” Rogers withdrew the string and put his hands behind his back, pink blooming across his stupidly perfect cheeks. 

“No, no, don’t mind me. Keep playing with your friend. Scruffy. There.”

Rogers’s ears burned red. “That’s not his name.”

Tony winced. “You gave him a name? You know, you’re not supposed to do that. Someone might adopt him.” Although this was the warning Tony had rehearsed and repeated hundreds of times, he had to swallow a bitter comment about how  _ no one  _ in their right mind would ever adopt  _ that  _ kitten.

“He likes me,” Rogers said. And the weirdest thing was, he  _ did.  _ That scruffy ragamuffin kitten was winding around Rogers’s hand and purring. Its pupils were huge. It blinked slowly at Rogers as Rogers absently stroked the kitten’s long, lean body- a body which was covered in matted gray fur, still bloody in places, mostly near its front left leg, which was missing.

Tony stared at them, confounded. “I don’t get it. How do you do it, Rogers? That is the meanest, worst-tempered kitten in the whole pound. He bites me every time I even get  _ near  _ him. He’s skinny, he’s ugly, and his front leg is missing. And he likes you. Did that super-serum give you the ability to speak to animals? Is there some fairytale witchcraft going on here? What are you, the Cat Whisperer? A Disney princess? Tell me, what's your secret.”

“Maybe you weren’t being gentle enough.” Rogers scratched the kitten’s cheek. The kitten leaned into his hand, purring, eyes closed. 

Tony was marginally offended. “I’ll have you know, I am  _ excellent  _ with cats.  _ That  _ one is evil.”

“He’s not evil!” Rogers snapped. The kitten startled. Rogers scooped the mangy thing up and cradled it to his magnificent bosom. Tony was jealous for a second. Rogers soothed the kitten. “He’s just… been through a lot.”

Tony wrinkled his nose. “You talk like you  _ know  _ him.”

Rogers got that faraway look on his face that was a mixture of sadness and nostalgia so deep you could feel yourself being pulled into it with him. “He reminds me of the cat I had growing up.”

“All right, I’ll bite.” Tony was sick of his non-cat-petting status and picked up a nearby black one, just to have something to hold. The beautiful, sleek black cat squirmed at first, but soon succumbed to Tony’s excellent petting skills. “What cat you had growing up.”

Rogers sad-smiled. His hand slowed along the mangy kitten’s back. “His name was Bucky. I found him in an alley when I was six. Or… he found  _ me.  _ I was being kicked around by a group of bullies. They cornered me into this dark alley. It was narrow, and dirty, and full of trash. I picked up the lid of a trash can to defend myself. They were closing in. And then there was this  _ yowl.  _ A gray cat streaked out from between two garbage cans and ran towards them. Spooked ‘em so bad, they scattered.

(“Cowards!” the young Steve had shouted after them. He’d thrown down his trash can lid in frustration and rubbed at his bloody lip, smearing a red streak under his nose.)

“After they left, the cat came back. I suppose I should’ve thanked it, that cat probably saved my life. Those kids had a good three years on me, and probably weighed twice as much. But… I was annoyed. I kind of yelled at it, and, uh. Told it I could’ve handled it myself.

(“I had ‘em on the ropes! Stupid cat…” The cat had sat near the wall and stared at him.)

“I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, if it hadn’t happened again. I’d forgotten about the cat by then, thought it was just a fluke, a one-time coincidence. And maybe that’s all it was, maybe I was just beaten up in the right alley at the right time. But I was backed into another alley, cornered by another doofus that thought he was better than me, and this guy was calling me all kinds of slurs. I got called queer a lot back then-- looking back, it’s probably because I was so short, and looked kind of girly, and those guys were probably threatened by guys like me. Might’ve made them question their own sexuality. They had reason to be scared.

“But it was one of these guys that had me cornered-- I was barely thirteen. I had a trash can lid held up in front of me. I was ready to take the hit. And then this gray cat came out of nowhere and leapt onto this guy’s face, just kept yowling and scratching him. The guy was screaming. I didn’t know what to think. I lowered my shield. The guy ran screaming out of the alley, cursing the ‘devil cat’. And when I finished wiping the dirt off my cheeks and walked out of the alley, there it was, sitting on the sidewalk, licking its front paw. It looked up at me with these big blue-green eyes, like it knew me.

(Steve had crouched down on the sidewalk and held out his hand. The cat had sniffed it, checked his face, and butted its head against Steve’s bony palm.)

“That time, I thanked him.

“After that, it was strange. I kept running into this cat, every time I passed through that part of the neighborhood, and after a while, it seemed like the cat was following me.

“One morning, I woke up, and there was a dead rat on my doorstep. My neighbor, Mrs. Fezzimyer, freaked out and screamed for me to throw it away. But even as I wrapped the tiny corpse in a plastic bag and carried it to the dumpster, I knew who had left it for me.

“My ma and I were poor. We couldn’t afford more than a one-room apartment, in a poorer neighborhood in Brooklyn. We weren’t allowed to have a pet. There wasn’t much room for one, anyway. But the super knew my ma, and he liked her, so when I wanted to leave out scraps for B- for the cat, he’d turn the other way.

“One night, after work, when I was about fifteen, I found Bucky on our porch. He was sitting there proudly with this dead pigeon in his mouth. I asked him if he’d killed it for me-- he’d been leaving things on our porch almost every morning; my ma thought it was in return for us leaving out food for him every night. And Bucky, he walked towards me, deposited the pigeon near my feet, and sat down. 

(“You want me to pick it up?” Steve had said. The cat had waited. Steve had slowly reached into his back pocket to produce the now-familiar plastic bag. He had stooped down slowly to scoop up the dead bird; all the while, the cat stared at him.)

“After I picked it up, he… I think he expected me to eat it. When I went to throw it away, he meowed at me and tried to block my path. I tried to explain that I eat human food, but the argument sounded… kind of bad.

(“I don’t eat birds! Well- not raw. We have to  _ cook  _ them.” ‘Meow!’ “I can’t just take this dead pigeon into the kitchen. Ma would kill me.” ‘Meow!’ “What do you want me to do, pluck it myself?” ‘Meow!’)

“I stared at the pigeon for a minute. It was a pretty good size, lots of fat on it.

(Steve had sighed. The wheezy breath rattled his asthma-riddled lungs. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”)

“So I took it into the kitchen and showed my ma. I explained that it was free meat, and if we cooked it right, we probably wouldn’t get sick. Any other month, she might’ve said no, but… I’d taken sick again, and she was working double shifts just to cover my medicine. 

(“Put it over there,” Sarah said, pointing towards the counter. “I’ll prepare it after work.”)

“And that’s how we ended up having pigeon for dinner.

“Bucky kept dropping dead animals on our doorstep, including some pretty good-sized rats that I’m pretty sure were bigger than  _ he  _ was. Eventually he got the notion that we’d eat the pigeons, but not the rats, or the mice, or, on one occasion, a dead kitten.

“Our neighbors weren’t too fond of Bucky. I’m pretty much the only one he liked; anyone else, he’d flirt with them from a distance, but as soon as they got close to me, he’d hiss. I think… maybe he was jealous. And, it was kind of nice, because I didn’t have anyone who felt that way about me.

“He got us through that winter, by bringing us pigeons. We’d leave him the gizzards.

“That spring, my ma got transferred to the TB ward. Didn’t think much of it; she was a nurse, she went wherever she was needed. I was trying to find a job. Had my own things to worry about. Was hard to find someone who would hire me. Most of ‘em took one look at me and said no. But I kept tryin’. Kept asking anyone with a Help Wanted sign. 

“Eventually I got a job at the local supermarket. Made enough that I could buy him actual cat food. I was so excited, when I opened my first can. I thought, ‘he’s going to love this.’ I left it out for him that night.

“Come morning, he hadn’t touched it. 

“I thought maybe he just hadn’t come by that night. So I tried again. Left out another bowl of cat food for him.

“Next morning, there was a dead rat in the bowl, and all the cat food was still there. Kind of his way of saying ‘fuck you.’” Steve chuckled. “I guess he didn’t want to be fed.” The mangy kitten had fallen asleep in his arms and looked maddeningly content. “-We went back to leaving scraps for him, but he wouldn’t eat them. But we knew he was there, because he’d still leave us dead pigeons.

“The summer I turned seventeen, my ma got sick. At first we thought it was a cold. We caught those year-round; between her working in a hospital and me having asthma and sinus problems, it seemed one of us was always coughing or sniffling. We didn’t think much of it.

“But Bucky started sticking around. He started sleeping in the alley next to our building. He’d meow at me whenever I passed.

(“What is it, boy?” Steve would ask, stooping down to pet the cat.)

“When he opened his mouth, I noticed one of his front teeth was missing. A friend at the grocery store said that happened a lot with stray cats, said they’d break their teeth on the bones of small prey. Considering how good of a hunter he was, it was really a surprise that this hadn’t happened earlier.

“I thought the missing front tooth was kind of cute, so I took to calling him Bucky. 

(“You like that, Buck?” The cat wound around his legs, purring.)

“He seemed to like it. 

“By the end of summer, my ma got worse and worse. Bucky would sleep on our porch sometimes. He’d wake up and meow at her when she tried to leave.” Rogers did the sad-smile thing. “Almost like he knew.”

“Knew what?” Tony prompted. The sleek black cat had fallen asleep in his lap, sprawled out like the god he probably thought he was. Tony kept petting him anyway.

Rogers’s fingers stilled on the kitten’s chin. His gaze was sad and distant. “My ma died that September.”

Tony didn’t know what to say to that. Rogers seemed to be done telling his story. Or maybe he was just taking a really long pause. The kitten in his arms woke up and stared blearily up at Rogers. It stretched its front arm-and-stub, claws out, and yawned, its head splitting open snake-like, bearing dozens of needley teeth, before its jaws snapped back shut and it stood on Rogers’s forearm and arched its back.

Rogers reached over with his other hand to absently stroke the kitten’s back until it settled back down in a different position and started purring again. 

“And that’s why you have a thing for Mangy McCrankypants over there?” Tony said.

“His name is Bucky,” Rogers retorted.

“You named him after your childhood cat?”

“It’s… There’s more than that.” Rogers stroked the mangy kitten. “He was more than that.”

“Then please elaborate. Because all I’m getting here is, sentimental attachment to mangy stray.”

Rogers sent him a glare. The kitten made an adorable squeaky sound that caught Rogers’s attention. His expression softened. He scratched the kitten under its mangy chin. “He was there for me, after my ma died. He was… all I had. I didn’t have anyone else to talk to, anyone else to take care of me. Even when I had nothing... I had Bucky.

“The neighbors, and the super, looked the other way when he started sleeping in my apartment. I don’t think many of them expected me to live through the winter. Bucky would… he’d curl up, against my chest, while I slept, and purr. When I got sick, it… it helped. Made it easier to breathe.” Rogers was actually getting choked up over this memory. His eyes were getting misty.

Tony blinked his definitely dry eyes to clear away what were definitely not tears, because getting emotional over a stray cat was definitely not his thing. The cat in his lap stabbed him with its claws and demanded attention. Tony jumped, upsetting the cat, which wandered majestically off and sent him a scoff over its shoulder. The cat's tail twitched in annoyance. It settled down near a wall and licked its own ass. Tony rolled his eyes.

Rogers went on, “When the draft started, I wondered if there was a way I could take him with me. Turned out, I didn’t need to worry about that.

“The morning after my fourth rejection to join the U.S. Army, Bucky didn’t come back home. I looked everywhere for him. Every alley, every one of his usual hideouts. Couldn’t find him.

“And… then, on the side of the road, I found this cat. He was gray, just like mine. His eyes had gone all glassy. There were flies. He…” Rogers swallowed. “He’d gotten into a fight, from the looks of it. Maybe with a dog. Couldn’t tell. But he was all scratched up, bleeding in several places, and his front leg was completely gone. Didn’t see it anywhere nearby. And there was a trail of blood in the street. Best I can guess… he was trying to find his way home, and got hit by a car.”

“So you think,” Tony said, trying to put this whole thing together, “if you save this cat from the pound, somehow that will make up for your childhood cat.”

Rogers swallowed. “I can offer him more now. I can keep him safe. I know… it doesn’t fix things, but. Somehow, it seems like, almost… like I’m returning the favor.”

“All right.” Tony slapped his hands together. “We’re gonna get you a cat.”

“What? But… Didn’t Pepper-?”

“Fuck what Pepper said. You want that cat? We’re gonna get you that cat. Who cares if he hates me.” Tony grabbed Rogers by his stupid, stubborn wrist and pulled him towards the front desk and told the lovely lady there that his big, buff friend here wanted to adopt a cat. The woman at the front desk could not have been more pleased.

Tony ignored the stab of jealousy over the overt admiration she was showering upon the Captain and his adorable flustered response.

Captain Rogers signed the paperwork, Tony paid the five dollars, and bam. Captain America had a cat.

Tony patted himself on the back internally for doing such a good deed. He congratulated himself for being so selfless; even though he’d been wanting his own cat for years, he’d just bought what was essentially the only cat in all of New York that actually hated him.

The cat clung to Rogers’s bosom like it was born there. Rogers kept staring down at the tiny thing in disbelief.

“Yep,” Tony rambled, “We’re gonna take this thing home, and get it all cleaned up, buy it a brush and some food and a litter box- J.A.R.V.I.S., where’s the nearest pet store? -and a collar, and you can name it whatever you want, let it live in your bedroom, or in the tower, whatever you want, and meantime, I’m contacting the best vets in the area to see what we can do about that leg. Because let’s get real here, that thing looks infected. And I did not just spend five dollars and the past half hour on a mangy little runt that’s going to die of neglect if we don’t do something about it. How long has the leg been missing anyway? How long have you been  _ going  _ there? -never mind, they probably have security footage of whoever the poor schmuck is that demon-cat got into a fight with. The leg wasn’t missing when he got there. Anyway. 42nd street, turn left. And don’t worry, I’m buying.”

Rogers had teared up again. He was blinking rapidly and badly trying to pretend that he was fine.

Tony slapped him on the back. His stupidly perfect, sculpted, very warm back. “You know, when that leg is healed, I could probably work out some advanced robotics to give him a prosthetic limb. Would you like that, Satan? A nice shiny new leg instead of that bloody stump you’re working?”

The matted kitten mow’d at him, exposing most of its teeth. But didn’t bite him, for once, so Tony took that as a yes.

“Thank you,” Rogers said, fighting back tears.

“Hey, whatever.” Tony let his hand linger on Cap’s back. “It’s just a cat, right?”

**Author's Note:**

> That black cat was probably Loki.


End file.
